Since publication of the works of Hamilton, Chaunu, and Borah between 1934 and 1951, followed by Bakewell’s imaginative speculation on the link among American silver, colonial trade, and the “decline” of Spain, Hispanists and Latin Americanists have awaited quantification of the flows of merchandise and silver in Spain’s Atlantic pipeline in the second half of the seventeenth century. García Fuentes’s monograph does not settle, but does help to inform, the issue.
In the first part, he provides a broad conspectus of the “Sevillian nucleus” of colonial trade, and here one perceives how porous was Spain’s bullionist or early mercantilist system. Resident foreign merchants, French, Flemish, and Italian, and foreign manufactures predominated; only foreign merchants and their goods were involved in the 1659 flota while, when major suppliers of manufactures in colonial trade—England and Holland—were at war, textiles were in short supply at Seville and Cádiz. When Madrid authorities seemed to demand the expulsion of foreign merchants from Seville (1682), the Seville consulado protected them, and the issue was shelved for payment of 400,000 pesos. Was Madrid’s real intent simply to exact the large servicio received?
In the debate over “decline,” the critical factor has been the absence of quantitative data after about 1660. This monograph is amply grounded upon primary sources long available, such as the AGI’s contratación, contaduría, and indiferente sections. Quantitative material comes from the contratación series, principally ship manifests (registros) supplying data on sailings, destination, ship construction, shipowner, and type, volume, and (not always) value of merchandise; manifests of inbound shipping are not the originals, but transcriptions (traslados). These data have serious omissions, which García Fuentes does not minimize. There are the unrecorded ships’ arrivals at Cádiz and Seville, fraud and smuggling through customs, smuggling at sea, and—perhaps the most critical omission—smuggling covered by compensatory payments (indultos) from infractors to the Madrid government. Indultos covered “enormous” amounts of inbound cargo.
Typical of the modus vivendi (collusion?) between government and the Lower Andalusian private sector of Spanish and foreign resident merchants was the role of the indulto in papering over the acknowledged undervaluing of outbound and inbound cargo; indultos compensated the government for loss of customs revenues particularly on inbound cargo of “plata y géneros que vinieron por registros” (p. 120). In 1661, for example, the Consulado of Seville requested that the government accept an indulto that García Fuentes terms “un remedio eficaz para evitar los fraudes y la codicia de los extrangeros” (p. 131). Clearly the level of indulto payments between 1684 and 1700 rose extraordinarily over that of the preceding three decades, reaching 500,000 pesos in 1684 and 1695, and in 1692 the remarkable level of 2.5 million pesos. This hardly suggests decline in Atlantic trade at the end of the seventeenth century.
The last three chapters, two on agricultural and textile (and some metallurgical) exports to the American colonies, the other on inflows of silver and gold (caudales), mark this monograph’s major contribution. By law, one-third of cargo space was reserved in theory for a broad range of Andalusian agricultural exports; in fact, only wines and brandies were shipped, and there was a decline in wine volume, 1680-99, counterbalanced by a surprising rise in brandy shipments. Significantly, New Spain appears as the largest single importer of wines (55 percent), brandies (37 percent), ironwares (65-73 percent), and of unspecified textiles (44 percent). The key item in exports to the colonies was predictably neither agricultural nor metallurgical, but expensive linens, silks, and woolens (constituting the bulk of exports by value), a high percentage of which were French, supplemented by Low Country production. Again, typical of the Spanish pseudo-mercantile system, packages of drygoods were never opened at customs; hence “it is difficult to be mathematically precise about the level of textile exports to the colonies” (p. 296).
On the critical issue of precious metals returns of the last half of the seventeenth century, García Fuentes finds that official statistics of receipts at Lower Andalusia’s ports reveal a marked decline, 1680-99. Nonetheless, he believes that in fact precious metals imports from the colonies were rising markedly in the 1690s, concurring with Morineau and Everaert. García Fuentes concludes that official Seville figures were grossly understated, but his evidence still remains indirect, e.g., the enormous indulto of 2.5 million pesos of 1692 and the confession that the flota of New Spain in 1698 was valued as at least 10 million pesos. He notes, too, the sharp discrepancy between Veracruz accounts (cartas cuentas) of 6.9 million pesos (1670-78) and Seville’s records of 2.2 million, discrepancies repeated in 1681-89 (2.7 million to 1.4).
This study of the “organization and evolution” of Spain’s colonial trade in the second half of the seventeenth century offers convincing, modestly stated conclusions. First, the scale of indultos indicates that private interests, Spanish and foreign (largely French), dominated the government’s Casa de Contratación; the symbiotic relationship between foreign and Spanish merchants at both Seville and Cádiz led them to collaborate in bribing Madrid to tolerate illegal practices in return for gifts (donativos) of 3.5 million pesos and indultos (almost 6 million) over fifty years. It was a classic example of an impoverished state and a wealthy mercantile community. Second, after 1660 there was a long-term upward trend in colonial traffic, most of the exports to the colonies consisting of non-Spanish textiles and other manufactures. Finally, New Spain began to surface as the major colonial pole of the Spanish transatlantic commercial system.
